This is one of those stories about how today’s kids don’t know how good they have it, so if you’r
e one of “today’s kids,” feel free to file this under “annoying drivel from a preachy old
geezer."

Just kidding, kids. If I have to say so myself — and I obviously do — this column on the first
night of the high-school football playoffs is good stuff.

Most of us know that the playoffs didn’t start when the first high-schoolers slipped on their
leather helmets and lugged around what looked more like a giant grapefruit than a football.But
those who don’t remember what it was like not to have a chance to determine an actual state
champion probably haven’t given much thought to what it must have been like before the playoffs
were born as a scrawny, ugly babe in 1972.

Earle Bruce, the former Ohio State football coach, knows better than all of us. He not only
coached two undefeated seasons at Massillon in 1964 and ’65, where his teams won two of the Tigers’
13 state poll championships but also was coach at Salem (1956-59) and Sandusky (1960-63).

It was while he was at Salem in 1957 that he experienced his first taste of postseason play,
even though the actual playoffs were 15 years away. If you don’t think things were different in
those days, well …

“We did something at Salem no one will ever be able to do again,” Bruce said. “We played
Leetonia on Friday night and beat them 27-0. On Tuesday, we played a rescheduled game against East
Palestine. They had beaten us 41-6 the year before. We beat them 41-6 this time, and they had won
22 straight. “Well, Brookfield was unbeaten, and it was in the paper that they were looking for a
postseason game, and I told our athletic director, I said, ‘Get them. We need the money.’ ”

They were
looking for a postseason game?

“I didn’t even know it was legal,” Bruce said. “But I wanted to beat that guy (Brookfield coach
and later Cincinnati and Arizona coach Tony Mason) so bad. And we did, we beat them 19-6 and we had
6,600 there. We made a lot of money on that game.”

Playoffs? Well, sort of.

“Think about that,” Bruce said. “We won three games in eight days. They’d never let us to do
that today. They’d say we were abusing the kids.”

Bruce laughed.

“We had a middle linebacker named Henry Maxim, who was a great player,” Bruce said. “He broke
his thumb on the kickoff. I looked at him and it was disconnected, and he was rolling tape around
his thumb. I said ‘What are you doing? You’ve got to see the doctor.’ And he said, ‘If I see the
doctor, he won’t let me play, and I’m
playing in this game.’ And I said, ‘Then, go ahead and play.’ ”

Bruce was 26 and he said he would have given anything to have that team — it lost one game in
the rain at Ravenna — participate in a postseason playoff. The state poll had only one division at
the time, and he said Salem was ranked No. 7 or 8. The school hadn’t been good in football in the
years before his arrival, so it had no chance to finish on top in a vote of the state’s
sportswriters.

Cleveland Benedictine won that year during a four-year period where Massillon didn’t win. The
Tigers won seven straight poll titles from 1948 to ’54 then won two more in ’59 and ’60, so going
undefeated there was almost a guarantee that Massillon would be crowned, regardless of how many
other unbeatens there were in Ohio.

Bruce got to experience the other side of that when he got to Massillon in ’64 and he didn’t
dispute the Associated Press panel’s judgment on his poll titles because the schedule his Tigers
played was horrifically tough.

“We played Niles McKinley in the (Akron) Rubber Bowl in front of 31,000 people and beat them
14-8,” he said. “We played Mansfield, Steubenville, Warren Harding, all were powerhouses at the
time. We played Altoona, Pa., when they had Mike Reid, who later played for the Bengals. We played
everybody.”

Well, it sure seemed like it. But when the title was decided on the field instead of the polls
in the 1970s, Warren Western Reserve won the first big-school title and then Cincinnati schools,
Moeller and Princeton, won eight of the next 11.

Bruce noted that Massillon played Cincinnati Roger Bacon, which was that city’s power under Bron
Bacevich in the 1950s and ’60s, twice and beat it both times, but the uncertainty about whether
Massillon
really should have won all of those mythical titles shows why today’s kids have it so
good.

“I would have liked to have had playoffs,” Bruce said. “But we didn’t and there’s nothing we
could do about it. It’s too bad.”